4 (page 44)p. 44The nature of music

Ethnomusicologists have made important contributions to understanding the nature of music from the vantage point of their fieldwork-based idiographic musical ethnographies. Arguably ethnomusicology’s most important theoretical move has been a sustained attack over more than a half-century on the notion, purveyed until recently by its sister musicological disciplines, that music is primarily an art form made for its own sake, mystically transcendent in its effects, and with little or no social or practical significance. Combining the specificity of fieldwork with theories from anthropology and other social sciences, from feminism and other social movements, and from various philosophical traditions, ethnomusicologists have learned much about the nature of music as a human behavior and cultural practice in thousands of particular studies. In the process, they have created a rich picture of the nature of music and its significance for human life.

Ethnomusicological theories about the nature of music consist, implicitly or explicitly, of truth claims in the form of metaphors that link music to other domains of human thought. Among the most common metaphors are that

These metaphors, and others, can all coexist simultaneously or in sequence in any particular instance. They are based on theories being discussed broadly in the social sciences, humanities, and philosophy, and, taken together, they illustrate the richness of music’s significance in human life.

Probably the earliest form of ethnomusicological theorizing about the nature of music takes the form of claims about how music functions in culture and society and for individual human psychology. Traditional societies use music in innumerable ways across nearly all domains of life. Musical performances accompany nearly every important activity of cultural and social life, from birth to death and from work to rituals, religious ceremonies, leisure, and play. Beyond music’s use in everyday life, ethnomusicologists working in the anthropological tradition known as structural functionalism asked how all these uses of music function in society, or, in more modern terms, how individuals and societies use music as a resource in aid of various psychological and social goals. While structural functionalism no longer guides the thinking of ethnomusicologists, the notion that music does something for human psychology and social life; that it has psychological and social functions; and that it is a resource that people call on for different purposes, is still firmly embedded in ethnomusicologists’ thinking about the nature of music and its significance for human life.

Many cultures use music as a resource to integrate society around common, shared behaviors and values. In this strain of research, ethnomusicologists tend to claim that musical aesthetics and (page 46)p. 46behavioral and cultural ethics are two sides of the same coin. When people are taught, for example, to make what the culture deems good music, they are also enculturated and socialized into ways of being good people and acting appropriately within that society. Sometimes this is done in song texts. For example, an African initiation ceremony may include songs that instruct young adolescents in proper adult behavior. Richard Waterman (1914–71) wrote of the Yirkalla Aborigines in Australia that

throughout his life, the Aboriginal is surrounded by musical events that instruct him about his natural environment and its utilization by man, that teach him his world-view and shape his system of values, and that reinforce his understanding of Aboriginal concepts of status and of his own role.

Sometimes the enculturation occurs in the structures of musical performance. So, for example, if success in hunting depends on coordinated collaboration among the hunters, as it does among the forest-dwelling Aka people of central Africa, then their cooperative, interlocking, polyphonic singing before, during, and after hunting may prepare them for, and aid them with, that kind of work. School and patriotic songs help individuals feel connected to a social group and make them want to support that group and its values in competition or battle. Group performances, whether of large choral groups, massed bands, or synchronized dancers, enact social solidarity, provide a means for a community to see itself acting in social harmony, and experience itself in sync in an emotionally satisfying, intense, pleasing manner.

Music can also challenge powerful social institutions from positions of structural weakness. It can help to form communities where none have existed before, and to activate change in the underlying cultural assumptions and social structures of a society. For example, during the later years of the communist period in Bulgaria, the extravagant improvisatory virtuosity of Romani musicians playing modern instruments contrasted with the (page 47)p. 47staid arrangements played by government-sponsored folklore ensembles playing traditional instruments. Those differences in musical style became rallying points for those who opposed the totalitarian government and its draconian policies with respect to Muslim minorities.

Music is also a communicative resource in music-filled events that humans have invented to celebrate the progression of life stages and the cycle of seasons. In these cases music fosters communication between members of a society. Among the Suyá Indians of the Amazon basin, for example, each ceremonial musical performance tells the Suyá something about the person who is performing and about the season in which it is performed. The Suyá year is divided into rainy and dry seasons. These seasons are established not by changes in the weather but by changes in the ceremonies performed and the songs that are sung. It is not simply the coming of rain but the singing of rainy season songs that communicates to one and all that the rainy season has begun. Singing also communicates a person’s self-concept of his or her age category: child, adolescent, adult, or old person. A young boy might sing an adult song to signal his evolving sense of self. An aging adult male might begin to sing less forcefully to signal his passage into old age. An older woman, on the other hand, “might retain the sober demeanor characteristic of a younger woman.” Anthony Seeger concluded that “every ceremony was the opportunity to reaffirm not only what one was (a male and a member of certain groups) but what one believed one was or wanted to be.”

In another mode of communication, humans seem to believe nearly everywhere that singing, over and above ordinary speech, is necessary to communicate with gods, ancestors, and spirits. Often each moment of ceremonial liturgies and rituals is accompanied by a specific song or instrumental performance, implying that music has special powers to make the ceremony effective. Music is often the means used to contact the supernatural world and a sign in the natural world that such contact has occurred. African (page 48)p. 48and African-derived spirit-possession ceremonies provide some of the clearest examples. In the religious traditions of vodoun in Haiti, candomblé in Brazil, and santería in Cuba, a pantheon of spirits is called on to possess devotees through dances, costumes, percussion rhythms, and songs particular to each one. In all these traditions a master drummer leads a percussion ensemble playing interlocking, polyrhythmic patterns. When the master drummer senses that a trained devotee is about to go into trance, he plays a particular pattern that helps the spirit enter the mind and body of the possessed.

When a social group cannot be heard, for example when it is suppressed by a more powerful group, music often provides members of that group with a noisy, heartfelt way to communicate their feelings, beliefs, and their very existence to another group. And the opposite is just as true. The powerful can use music to control space and push minorities and the powerless literally and figuratively into the periphery.

Music is routinely a resource for the identification of social groups, whether the moieties of an Amazonian society, royal lineages in stratified societies, political parties in modern societies, or social categories such as youth and adults, men and women, rich and poor. In these cases music functions as a symbolic identifier of the social group both to its own members and to outsiders. In popular music traditions such as punk or death metal, for example, musicians and fans maintain a strict adherence to a particular aesthetic—both sartorial and musical—that serves to identify them to each other and to delineate who is and who is not a member of the subculture.

Merriam listed three ways music might be said to function as a psychological resource: entertainment; aesthetic enjoyment; and emotional expression. Music clearly is an important resource in all (page 49)p. 49manner of entertainments, from storytelling and dance to theater, film, television, and electronic games. In some cases, as in dance, it makes the entertainment possible; in others, it enhances the story with the emotional quality so often associated with music. Film music provides many examples of stereotypical musical gestures used to underline, and even create, romantic sentiment, fear, anticipation, and laughter.

Apart from its link to other forms of entertainment, people in most cultures use musical performance as a pastime, a distraction from the burdens of work and everyday life, and a lubricant for social interaction. In modern societies, professional musicians provide most of the musical entertainment, sometimes in concerts but most ubiquitously in recordings listened to on the radio, TV, CDs, and MP3 files through loudspeakers or on headphones.

Aesthetic enjoyment, which could be understood as a form of entertainment, seems to occur when people set aside musical performance, through special framing like a concert or a recording, as an object of contemplation. Rather than an entertaining diversion from either boredom or work or environmental noise, at concerts of music all other forms of stimulation are purposefully excluded so that intense focus can be placed on the musical experience.

Nearly everywhere musical performance seems to be an important resource for controlled emotional expression and the evocation of sentiment. The controlled nature of musical emotional expression contrasts to spontaneous outbursts of rage, sadness, or joy. For example, a Bulgarian woman I interviewed recalled an incident when, as a young bride, she felt slighted by her mother-in-law, with whom she lived along with her husband. When she burst into tears, she was counseled, “Stop crying; sing a song.” She was being admonished, in other words, to channel her uncontrolled, shameful crying into the controlled, acceptable frame of singing. Singing can express not only the individual emotions of the (page 50)p. 50performer but collectively felt emotions as well. Often a cathartic function has been attributed to singing, a way to let off steam and release tension, whether over a personal problem or the social rage of the powerless or the expression of feelings deemed inappropriate or even forbidden in everyday verbal interactions.

Music is used as a resource linking the individual and the social in two ways: physical response and agency. Because music is rhythmical, that is, it exists in time and often has a steady beat or pulse, it invites a physical response in those who hear it: snapping fingers, tapping feet, nodding heads, walking, marching, or dancing to the beat of the music. These shared responses provide a way for group members to bond together, understand and experience themselves as a social unit, and in some cases accomplish some special task, such as going to war as a unified and effective fighting force or working together efficiently. Acting together in rhythm to the music, people turn an individual psychological response into a social resource that brings communities, affinity groups, and entire societies into sync with one another.

Ethnomusicologists today also understand that individuals are agents who enact and challenge social norms, and use music as a resource to do so. Influenced by the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) on practice theory, they have come to understand music as a nonverbal practice that can, outside verbal discourse, create gendered individuals and other socially constructed identities and subjectivities. For example, Christopher Waterman’s study of a Yoruba jùjú musician and band leader in Ibadan, Nigeria, showed how that musician negotiated his relationship to two social groups: the upper classes for whom his band plays music; and the lower-class “band boys” whom he simultaneously cultivates and exploits. As a semiliterate musician, (page 51)p. 51he works in the low-status, beggarly occupation of musician, along with other low-status musicians whose loyalty he must ensure in order to keep his band together. However, because people with money and wealth demonstrate their prestige through the hiring of the best possible musicians, he, as a very successful band leader, has been able to elevate his status to that of a person with some of the same money, prestige, and honor as his wealthy clients. The band leader’s musical practice allows him to construct a self-identity that at once places him close to the social group of wealthy clients he plays for and at the same time keeps him not so socially distant from his band boys that they give up and leave his group to seek their fortunes elsewhere. He uses music as a resource to author himself.

Given even this short list of the ways humans use musical performance as a resource for achieving certain ends, ethnomusicologists are sometimes tempted to claim that music is as important as speech and language for individual humans and for human society. Not infrequently those we study support us in this view. As a Pueblo Indian from New Mexico once told the anthropologist Leslie White (1900–1975), “My friend, without songs you cannot do anything.”

Two other metaphoric claims about the nature of music hold that it is a cultural form or social behavior that may be iconic of, or coherent with, other cultural forms and behaviors, a view derived from a form of structuralism propounded by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009). One of the early studies along these lines, by Judith and Alton Becker, concerned the organization of time in Javanese gamelan music. Javanese gamelans, the largest orchestras outside the West, consist of a set of tuned bronze instruments, covering many octaves from enormous low-pitched hanging gongs to high-pitched, slab-key metallophones. Gamelan musicians create complicated polyphonic (page 52)p. 52textures. Mid-range metallophones play the melody in even beats. Higher-pitched metallophones and tuned gongs subdivide the beats of the melody in half or in quarters to provide an elaboration of the melody. Low-pitched gongs provide an accompaniment that in some ways can be understood as simplifying the melody. The result is the simultaneous sounding of many rhythmic cycles going at different speeds. According to the Beckers, the multiple time cycles of Javanese gamelan music are coherent with, or iconic of, the Javanese concept of time, which is multiply cyclical as well: it is based on a system of weeks of different number of days. The coherence of musical and cultural forms creates a sense that these forms are “natural,” even as they are culturally constructed.

In the 1960s Alan Lomax tried to work out the metaphor of music as social behavior in a vast comparative project labeled (page 53)p. 53“cantometrics,” a term he coined to capture his notion that song was a “measure of culture.” He attempted to demonstrate on a global basis that the structures of song performance could be related to the performance of more general social relationships. He claimed that “within any one culture or subculture, singing is a rather standardized form of behavior,” and that these musical standards are congruent with the culture’s social organization: “A culture’s favored song style reflects and reinforces the kind of behavior essential to its main subsistence effort and to its central and controlling social institutions.”

Lomax’s method involved collecting samples, submitted by anthropologists and others, of ten song performances from four hundred cultures from around the world. He then trained a team of “raters” to describe each example along thirty-six musical-style gradients, including melodic shape, loudness, “voice qualities, ornamentation, level of coordination, the rhythmic and musical organization of chorus and orchestra, the patterns of social organization in performance and how text is handled.” Using statistical analysis, he made many claims about the relationship between song structure and social structure on a cross-cultural basis. One example:

narrow intervals seem to be most frequent when there is much social stratification. The explanation may be that in a situation where one is continually addressing a person of higher or lower status restraints are imposed on the interaction so that it proceeds carefully—in small steps.

Lomax claimed that “for the first time, predictable and universal relationships have been established between the expressive and communication processes, on the one hand, and social structure and culture pattern, on the other.”

Because ethnomusicologists, by the time of that study in the late 1960s, were moving toward intensive studies of particular (page 54)p. 54cultures rather than extensive, comparative studies of this sort, their reaction to Lomax’s attempt to create a universal theory for understanding music and its relation to society was quite negative. They complained about the methodology, gave examples of how, within the cultures they knew well, there were enough differences in musical style to resist Lomax’s generalizations about a single dominant style and enough exceptions to his findings to make his statistical methods less than convincing.

While ethnomusicologists today might disagree with Lomax that relationships between song style and social style are predictable, they do tend to believe that music is a social behavior and that structural homologies between it and other social behaviors can be demonstrated through careful ethnographic work. The performance structure of North Indian classical music, for example, has aspects that seem to be homologous with, and explained by, the hierarchical social system of Indian society more broadly (conventionally known as the caste system). In the musical tradition, some vocalists known as Kalawants come from a higher social group than the accompanists (sarangi, harmonium, and tabla players). That social distinction parallels a musical structure in which melodic improvisation dominates. The accompanying sarangi or harmonium merely echoes the singer while the accompanying tabla holds the rhythmic cycle. The soloist contracts the concert, controls the structure of the performance, displays his artistry, and allocates how much money the accompanists make.

Among the Aymara Indians of the Peruvian Andes, musicians create new compositions collectively, a practice that is coherent with the collective ethos of the culture. In this instance, political leadership and musical leadership must always be exercised in relatively egalitarian group settings that involve everyone and that eschew direct argumentation. In music, while one man is an acknowledged “guide” and expert in music, a core group of music enthusiasts (maestros) collectively compose pieces for the (page 55)p. 55village panpipe ensemble. The process begins when someone creates a short melodic motif for a piece that will have an AA BB CC form. According to Turino:

The initial brainstorming phase is often rather lengthy. If the men are not interested in certain material that is being offered, they will simply ignore it rather than directly rejecting it, just as they do with inappropriate ideas offered in decision-making meetings in [town]. After a period of time, if a musician gets no reaction to the phrase or motives he is playing, he will drop them and try something else or simply fall silent. When an idea is found promising, however, others will gradually take notice, stop what they are doing, and join in softly on their instruments until everyone has taken it up.

Musical composition in this case is clearly a form of social behavior carried out in a way consistent with political decision making. Based on this example, it is probably not too far-fetched to (page 56)p. 56understand musical composition in European classical music as a social behavior coherent with ideas of individualism, talent, and heroic achievement in the culture at large.

The 1980s and early 1990s were the heyday of this sort of structuralist analysis. While ethnomusicologists continue to view music as a form of social behavior and as a cultural form, their search for homologies and coherences among them has been short-circuited by a move to poststructuralism. Poststructuralism rejects static homologies between music and cultural or social structures in favor of the study of the dynamic production, through musical performance, of social and cultural meanings. It is a move, in other words, away from the notion that music “reflects” culture to the idea that music can be productive of culture. Influenced by Clifford Geertz’s (1926–2006) interpretive anthropology, ethnomusicologists in this mode interpret or “read” the meaning of music and musical performance regarded as texts. The object of interpretation is to lay out in as much detail as possible the cultural motivations, meanings, and systems implicit in, and thus explaining, specific actions.

One of the earliest and clearest examples of the use of this metaphor of music-as-text was a study of musical life in an American conservatory of music. The author, Henry Kingsbury, interpreted students’ solo recitals, a typical capstone degree requirement, as an enactment of American individualism, a ritualized performance that has the potential to validate students’ professionalism or expose them as untalented or not yet ready for the status of professional musician. This emphasis on evaluation of the individual’s talent and preparation for professional life is part of a “cultural system” in which a recognition of differences in talent and ability are so pervasive that they take on an almost sacred character; hence, the ritualized nature of the solo recital as an expression of those beliefs and values. Kingsbury claims (page 57)p. 57that “a solo recital [is] a rite in a cult of the individual…. The continuing efficacy of the recital as a ritual in such a cult requires that some, but not all, succeed.” Such rituals are necessary to give life to a cultural system that values individuality. “The cultural value of individualism is not … airborne, [but is] produced and reproduced through ritual action,” and the solo musical recital is one of many such rituals in this cultural system. Such interpretations are dependent on a deep understanding of the cultural system being “read.” Getting to the point of making such confident readings takes long-term immersion in the culture through fieldwork. It is also easy to see how such readings stand apart from how the actors themselves may read and intend their own actions.

The ethnomusicological search for musical meaning has been at odds, until recently, with thinking in the fields of historical musicology and music theory. Scholars in those fields have been impressed by the differences between music and language. Whereas in language, English speakers agree about the meaning of a word like “tree,” no such consensus about the musical meaning of, say, a minor scale seems to exist, leading them to conclude that music has no meaning, or at least no shared meaning worth discussing. Ethnomusicologists realize that, while they may never find the musical equivalent of “tree,” they frequently observe human beings assigning meanings to musical features and performances just as they assign meaning to other cultural forms such as clothing, food, and physical gestures. Often these meanings arise from distinct historical and social positions, and so they differ from group to group or individual to individual or time to time.

The problem of these differing interpretations of musical meaning has been clarified by recourse to semiotics, the “science of signs,” especially the version propounded by the American philosopher (page 58)p. 58C. S. Peirce and explicated in detail for music study by Thomas Turino. Semiotics distinguishes three types of signs: symbols, indexes, and icons. Each operates according to different logics. Language uses symbols, that is, signs with specific, predictable meanings. Musical analysis and musicological interpretation depend on linguistic symbols. Turino argues, though, that symbols take us away from the direct experience of music. They are not at the core of musical meaning, and they fail to explain why people find music so meaningful and moving. He points rather to indexes and icons as sign types that encode the experience of music in direct and unmediated ways.

An index is a sign that points to the object it represents. This occurs in music when a particular piece or practice is associated with or occurs at the same time as something else. An obvious example would be a national anthem with patriotic text performed on political occasions. Pretty soon the anthem becomes a widely shared index of patriotism, and it can generate feelings of patriotism whenever played, say, before a sporting match, and even when played instrumentally without its lyrics. Such instances point to the possibility of shared musical meaning through shared associations and personal experiences. Just as important for musical experience are indexes that are personal and individual, the classic example being the “our song” phenomenon, a song shared by two people in love; the song, as index, can generate strong feelings in the absence of the beloved and even long after the flame between them has cooled.

An icon is a sign that resembles in some way the thing it represents. The religious icon, a two-dimensional painting of a three-dimensional person, gives this type its name. Common musical icons include flutes imitating bird songs, ascending melodies representing joy or ascent into heaven and descending ones representing a descent into hell, and extravagant improvisation taken as an icon of personal freedom or the triumph of the individual over the system. Sometimes the interpretation of (page 59)p. 59musical icons depends on the experience of the listener. At other times, as when people hear a piece as an icon of familiar music they have heard before, listeners can imagine themselves as part of the social group that makes that kind of music. Understanding a musical gesture as an icon is an act of imagination that contributes to a person’s sense of identity and triggers the strong emotions associated with that identity.

Turino concludes that music “involves signs of direct feeling and experience,” specifically icons and indexes. While music can be read for meaning just as language can be, it is, after all, a different kind of sign system from language. Music does something else for humankind besides creating meaning, something just as important. According to Turino:

When people shift to symbolic thinking and discourse [as in language] to communicate about deep feelings and experiences, the feeling and reality of those experiences disappear and we are not satisfied. This is because we have moved to a more highly mediated, generalized mode of discourse, away from signs of direct feeling and experience. Symbols … fall short in the realm of feeling and experience. That is why we need music.

Another factor that makes music so potentially rich in meaning is the complexity of its nature as a sign. Music as a sign has many elements, and each can be an icon or index with meanings that reinforce or contradict one another. The elements of music include melody, meter and rhythm, the timbre or sound quality of instruments and voices, the weaving together of many melodies or rhythms into textures and harmonies, and performance choices like tempo, dynamics, and articulation. A modern Bulgarian postsocialist musical genre called “popfolk” uses different elements of music to construct a complex sign pointing to competing imagined identities. Synthesizers, drum sets, and electric guitars produce an underlying bed of amplified sound that is an icon of modern forms of global popular music. This (page 60)p. 60element in the musical sign allows Bulgarian fans of this music to imagine themselves as modern and connected to a cosmopolitan culture in which this kind of music is ubiquitous. The lyrics are in Bulgarian, and sometimes a Bulgarian traditional instrument like the bagpipe is added to the mix, underscoring the Bulgarianness of this genre and its link to Bulgarian national identity. Some of the genre’s best musicians and singers are Roma, and so the genre features brilliant instrumental solos on clarinet and saxophone in nonmetrical styles and rhythms iconic of Romani and Turkish musical styles and genres, helping to create a sense of identity that acknowledges and even celebrates Bulgaria’s Ottoman past and Bulgarians’ distance from a pan-European identity. The cross-cutting and conflicting musical icons in this genre lead Bulgarians with different senses of Bulgarian identity to respond emotionally to it in very different ways. The complexity of music as a sign partly explains why music is such a powerful bearer of musical meaning and emotion.

Even though ethnomusicologists have spent most of their time developing alternative metaphors to the notion that music is an art, in the end, that metaphor is virtually inescapable. Claiming that music is an art, however, opens up a question that has proven remarkably elusive to answer, namely: What is art? To oversimplify, definitions of art exist at two extremes. At one end and for most of its history, European thought has held that art is the skillful making of something; it is synonymous with mastery of a skill or craft like painting, cabinet making, or playing music. Art as skillful execution leads to such locutions as the art of war or the art of medicine. This definition puts a great deal of emphasis on the makers of art. Although developments in European philosophy since the eighteenth century have largely supplanted this older definition, ethnomusicologists continue to embrace it because of its emphasis on the making of art and on human agency. This definition’s avoidance of a distinction between (page 61)p. 61fine art and functional art, that is, between art and craft, fits ethnomusicologists’ worldviews rather well. Art by this definition exists in every culture on earth, and ethnomusicological studies of those cultures are filled with fascinating accounts of musical skill and craft, in other words, musical art.

The other extreme of European definitions of art is indebted to Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) Critique of Judgment (1790). It emphasizes the experience of the listener and links art to aesthetic judgments of the beautiful, the sublime, the good, and the agreeable. In effect, after Kant art and aesthetics became almost synonymous. This view of art focuses on the ability of art, and the “artwork,” to express emotions (as music often does); represent or imitate something beyond the work (as paintings and sculpture often do); possess formal elements worthy of interest and contemplation for their own sake (“the music sound itself”); and generate sensory experiences that can be judged aesthetically as beautiful or ugly, tasteful or gauche, and so forth. Such aesthetic verdicts are based on substantive qualities supposedly in the artwork itself, qualities such as elegance, balance, complexity, and the like.

As the previous discussion of metaphors should have made clear, ethnomusicologists find plenty of evidence in a wide variety of cultures of music as a resource to express emotions and as a text or sign system that represents something beyond music. The other two parts of the definition are more problematic for them, however.

The idea that music is an art with formal properties worthy of contemplation for their own sake might lead to research similar, in some respects, to the search for skill and craft in the first definition of art, and it comes naturally to European-trained ethnomusicologists. Like all musicians, ethnomusicologists have spent hours acquiring the craft of making music. When they hear others make music, they want to know how the music works, how (page 62)p. 62the elements come together to make a coherent performance or a “work” of music. In ethnomusicology this curiosity about the products of musical thinking is satisfied through extensive musical analysis, sometimes using transcriptions or notations produced by the musical culture under study. This type of detailed formal analysis of works and performances of music as art declined after about 1980 in favor of research that used other metaphors to situate music within culture and society.

In the last decade, though, analysis of the formal properties of world music has been resurrected under the leadership of the composer and ethnomusicologist Michael Tenzer. He and his colleagues seek to “inscribe and analyze musical structure to journey attentively into it, to experience each performance/piece/sound-world as a singular, textured, and refined event.” These goals reposition ethnomusicological study within a European, universalizing definition of what art is in contrast to the last thirty years of ethnomusicological work, which justified the formal analysis of music as a method to understand culturally specific instances of music as a skill or craft, a cultural resource, a social behavior, and the like. Careful attention to the formal properties of musical works can provide one type of answer to the question of how humans are musical in particular instances, and Tenzer holds out the hope that it may lead, as well, to the discovery of common principles governing human musicality and thus to an understanding of our common humanity.

This view of music as art, in the Kantian sense, creates many problems for ethnomusicologists. The first is that it has been used to valorize a limited, European view of art as always about beauty and to relegate non-European practices to a category of non-art or functional or applied art. Ethnomusicological research, using a combination of many metaphors about the nature of music, shows that even European musical art may have nonaesthetic social, cultural, and political functions, and that many cultures, though by no means all, make their own specific judgments about what (page 63)p. 63is good and beautiful in music. In other words, the substance on which verdicts of beauty are made are culturally specific and not universal.

The second problem is that, as Turino suggests, music may not be “a unitary art form, but rather … [it] refers to fundamentally distinct types of activities that fulfill different needs and ways of being human.” He distinguishes four types of musical art: participatory live performances, presentational live performances, high-fidelity recordings, and “studio audio art” recordings. He maintains that each type needs to be judged according to its own goals, not from a single, universal perspective about the nature of music.

Ethnographic cases in which aesthetic judgments of the formal properties of art or its effect on the emotions are missing constitute a third problem with this definition of art for ethnomusicologists. Writing about his research on Navajo (Diné) music, for example, David McAllester recounts how he thought he was asking a question about “esthetics and personal preference” when he asked them how they “felt” when they heard certain kinds of singing. He was surprised when they answered something like, “I’m all right. There is nothing the matter with me.” Because so much of Diné music is used to cure physical and mental illnesses rather than for aesthetic enjoyment and contemplation, McAllester learned that questions about aesthetics offended his interlocutors, who thought he was implying that they were ill. A “good” performance in this case is one with enough intensity to heal the sick, not to create an aesthetically agreeable sensory experience.

A fourth problem for ethnomusicologists with this definition of art is their concern that the link between aesthetics and art is not autonomous. Rather, they are wont to observe that powerful institutions often confer on musical practices the status of “artworks” and define what art is. Ethnomusicologists routinely teach in one such institution, the university music school or college (page 64)p. 64music department, many of which perpetuate a particularly narrow view of musical art devoted exclusively to so-called Western art music.

Understanding music metaphorically as a resource that functions psychologically and socially; as a cultural practice or social behavior homologous or coherent with other cultural and social practices; as a text that can be read for meaning; as a system of signs capable of provoking deep feelings and emotions and new social understandings; and as an art does not exhaust ethnomusicologists’ contribution to the study of the nature of music. Their studies along these lines, however, do provide an important corrective to the notion that music is merely an art for its own sake. By making these metaphors, ethnomusicologists have amplified significantly the claims, made from ancient times to the present, that music is essential to the enterprise of being human and of acting humanely in the world.